


Red in Tooth and Claw

by concernedlily



Series: Entropy sequence [6]
Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Casual Sex, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 17:20:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5506334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/concernedlily/pseuds/concernedlily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry and Merlin work some things out. (Set during part 4 of the Entropy sequence.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red in Tooth and Claw

**Author's Note:**

> Harry POV of some of the Entropy events. This story takes place during chapter 1 of The Call of the Void, and spoils a couple of the reveals in Epimetheus and Janus.

Harry looked up from the research proposal he was reading and noticed it was already dark. He sighed and took his glasses off, rubbing at the furl of scar tissue on his temple and its dull ache.

It wasn’t so late as there to be no point going home, but he decided to stay over in his rooms at the estate instead. Either he was growing lazy in his old age, or the house he’d considered a pleasant refuge from the stresses of Kingsman for thirty years had been changed irrevocably by six months of co-habitation with Eggsy, and now in his absence wasn’t worth the shuttle train home.

Christ. He’d take the old age. The brief encounter with Eggsy in the hall earlier had evidently unsettled him more than he'd realised. 

He rang down to the kitchens for tea and toast and changed fastidiously out of his suit jacket and tie and into a soft cardigan, replacing his shoes with slippers and giving his hands and face a quick splash. The mirror, rather depressingly, showed tired purple-rimmed eyes and a face like crumpled washing. He looked down at his hands and concentrated on scrubbing his fingernails clean.

There was a discreet knock at the door and he went to get his supper.

“What are you doing with my toast?” he said.

Merlin curled his lip, handed over the tray, and said, “Stopping over again, Harry?”

“I didn’t realise there was a limit on using one’s own private quarters.”

“God forbid a spy organisation take notice of its agents’ comings and goings. Is everything all right?”

“Everything is fine,” Harry said irritably, “and if you're here to be profound at me, you can fuck the fuck off."

Merlin produced a bottle from somewhere and held it up. "I'm here to get pissed. I might let you have some."

That was all right, then. Harry opened the door wider and stood back to let Merlin past.

***

“I lied,” Merlin said, two glasses in. “I'm not just here to get pissed. I'm here to shout at you.”

“I thought so,” Harry said. “Lying bastard. All in the left hand. You should get rid of that tell, you know.”

“This old thing?” Merlin said and, predictably, gave him the finger.

“Get on with it, then,” Harry said. His chest felt unaccountably tight and he breathed deeply until his body backed into relaxation. With it, he felt himself sharpening, like the conversation and Merlin's presence were breaking into chess pieces, taking their places on the board, the next few minutes rolling out in front of him in different patterns. “It's Eggsy, I assume.”

“It is. What the fuck were you thinking?” Merlin said plainly, the rolling vowels of his accent blurring with depth of feeling.

Harry frowned at his glass. “I'm afraid you're going to have to be more specific.”

Merlin barked a laugh. “Aye, that's a good point. No. Earlier today, Harry. When the lad got out of med.”

“Really?” Harry said. The chess game shattered around him, reformed. “That? I kept an eye on a junior agent’s mission and checked on him when he was injured. Perfectly normal.”

“Don't feed me that shite,” Merlin snapped. “None of your behaviour round him is normal. Don't mess him about, Harry. You're making his life fucking difficult.”

“Did he say that to you?” Harry asked, appalled. He knew, of course, that Eggsy was upset, even struggling, knew himself to be the greater part of the cause of it. But for Eggsy to feel that he had to go to Merlin, over the pain Harry had caused him - Harry would have quite happily taken a dozen missions off his hands for it, taken a hundred knife wounds. 

His fist clenched around the glass, remembering the livid, delicately-stitched cut on Eggsy's cheek; even moreso the crushed tiredness on his lovely face. In the corridor earlier he'd looked like he had when he and Harry had first met, on the steps of the police station, Eggsy too lean, circles under his eyes, pale and sharp and sarcastic.

“No,” Merlin said reluctantly. “But he sodding _should have_. You know you're out of line, Harry. You binned him, you leave him alone.”

“I didn't bin him!” Harry said. God, no wonder the reproachful looks he'd been getting round the mansion and the lack of biscuits with his tea breaks, if that was what people thought; Eggsy was so popular, with his chippiness blunted enough by growing confidence in his own value people could look past it to the decency beneath. “You make it sound so bloody sordid.”

Merlin looked sorry, briefly. “No. That wasn't fair.” He studied Harry for a minute and Harry found he couldn't meet Merlin's gaze; his fellow recruits had joked about it, long before he'd assumed the Merlin role, that he didn't need the Kingsman glasses when he already had the X-Ray vision. Merlin said, “Do you want him to give you another chance?”

Harry got up, went to the sideboard and poured himself another drink; the bottle was getting on for empty. He said over his shoulder, “I'm not going to expect a young man of Eggsy's gifts to wait around for me to sort myself out, if that's what you're asking.”

“Oh, are you planning to sort yourself out?” Merlin said. Harry could feel him, not quite at his back, but standing up as well, and closer than Harry would have liked. He turned round and gave Merlin a fake, tight smile.

How could he explain it? Even to Merlin. How he'd seen Eggsy start to turn back to Harry for guidance and decisions, when he had the youth and talent that he should have been the one leading them both forward; how Harry had felt the wish to offer shelter and comfort, the joy when Eggsy accepted those things from him, start to become the urgent, ugly desire to hold too jealously and too closely to himself.

There was still time. Eggsy hadn’t begun to resent yet. Harry had felt it, his hands on Eggsy earlier for a brief, glorious, humbling moment. Eggsy would have yielded to Harry the way he used to, so beautifully, if Harry had asked.

And then - the deluge. Harry understood, dimly but honestly, the painful path he'd been dragging Eggsy down; he'd already let it go too far, and he couldn't see the turning off.

Merlin was watching him far too keenly.

Harry opened his mouth and what came out was, “That _fucking testing_ , Merlin.”

“Right, yeah,” Merlin said calmly. “Glad we’re going to have this out, at long last.”

“It was a bloody insult,” Harry said, filled with a righteous anger: the depth of feeling was novel and quite nice, after a month of numb pining over Eggsy, and he let himself sink into it.

“Oh, come on,” Merlin said with the low, slightly mocking tone he used when he was impatient. “You know why we had to, if it were any other agent you’d see why we had to. After what you went through -”

“One bad mission more or fewer barely makes any difference,” Harry said; he tried to modulate his voice away from shouting. One rarely got anywhere shouting at Merlin; it took a great deal to make him shout back, so Harry was very familiar with the uncomfortable sensation of feeling like an absolute nutter having a pop at someone who maintained an irritating veneer of reasonableness. 

“What happened in that church - being _shot in the head_ was not one more bad mission, Christ.”

“So you thought what would help would be to rub my nose in my other fuck-ups?” Harry said bitterly. “Thank you _very_ much. Everyone knows it's just a fucking formality.”

“It's not a formality, it's never been a formality,” Merlin said and now he was angry, flushing up his bald head and eyes narrow with the implied criticism of his training programme. “You're just shit-hard to get to, Harry. What are you actually pissed off about, that I did it, or I did it well? Actually cracked you?”

“I'm pissed off that you went through with the charade,” Harry said stiffly, fury and shame prickling through him. “Whatever, I don't know, _issues_ you might have convinced yourself I have, I've never brought them into the field -”

“Fucking listen to yourself,” Merlin snapped and Harry recognised with some surprise that this was really getting to him, a thin undertone of worry in Merlin’s restlessly clenching fists. “Do you really believe that? I’ve _seen you_ , Harry, after every one of those bloody shitty operations -”

“The ones you used the testing to so kindly remind me I fucked up?” Harry said. His chest was tight and he could feel his breath coming short, fought with himself to master his own reactions.

“You didn’t fuck them up. They went wrong, sometimes things go wrong. They fucked _you_ up, the way you drank after, am I supposed to watch you go back to that?” Merlin stared at him. Harry focused on a bead of sweat that was running down from his bald head and over the tired lines of his forehead; he himself felt warm, almost clammy. He wanted a small sit down and a large drink. Merlin sounded softer when he said, “You’re my friend, Harry. You’ve never held a grudge like this before, not with me.” 

“There’s never been Eggsy before,” Harry said, and now he did hear his voice rising, could feel his face twisting into dangerous narrow-eyed intensity. “How dare you drag him into it? What it did to him, hurting me like that -”

“Harry, I am sorry about that, but Eggsy and I have cleared the air, it’s not for you to -”

“You had no right to decide he should know those things about me!” Harry shouted. It was embarrassing, and cleansing, and he took a deep shuddering breath; his shoulders were rock tense and painful. 

Merlin fell back as he stepped forward and then he stiffened and squared back up. Harry felt the surge of energy and sharpness he associated with the first step onto enemy territory of an operation, and tried to tamp it down; he was angry, but he was always conscious of his capability to do real harm by mere instinct and habit. It was worse than ever, now: he woke from nightmares of the signal reverberating through his brain more often than was comfortable; it had been that he wouldn’t entirely settle down until he saw his hands bloodless-clean and steady and wreaking pleasure from Eggsy’s willing body.

“This wasn’t about your bloody grand romance, Harry, have a word with yourself,” Merlin said contemptuously and Harry bristled; oddly painful, that, from Merlin, who was perhaps the only person in the world with a decent map to Harry’s emotional landscape. “Where’s your fucking professionalism? I’m fond of him, you know that, I’m fond of _you_ , I didn’t fucking know how it would go.”

“You knew how I felt about him,” Harry said, hating the hollow, betrayed ring under it he could hear. Merlin understood it, even worse, looked briefly sorry. “You knew better than I did how he felt about me. Merlin in his office with his eyes, watching everything and everyone -”

Merlin flinched. “I’m not fucking omniscient -”

“No, you’re not,” Harry said softly. He stepped forward again and this time Merlin hunched in response, eyes on Harry’s looking startled and wary, and Harry felt the comforting sensation of predictability rolling in, of having found the gap in the defences where an explosive would do the most damage. “No, you do everything from safe in your bloody basement. You’ve no fucking idea what it’s like to put yourself at risk, not for other people, not for the work. You pissed your competition away and you’ve never been able to forgive those of us who can still get the job done -”

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up,” Merlin rapped out, loud and harsh. “Fucking - talk about the testing, Harry, always the same any time someone gets to anything you don’t want to hear, Harry ‘any fucking advantage’ Hart, you don’t fucking _learn_.”

He could see suddenly in Merlin's eyes, the tiny shift in his stance, that he was about to get either punched or kissed. He surprised himself with the discovery he was mildly interested in which it would turn out to be, and held still for it.

“You _complete fucking wankstain bastard_ ,” Merlin finished.

And it was the kiss. Well, all right. He opened his mouth for Merlin’s tongue.

He'd had various encounters with Merlin, sporadically over the decades, and as always part of the entertainment was in tracking the changes. It had been a good seven or eight years, this time. Merlin kissed more heavily, in a practiced way that hinted in his greater preoccupations now.

He got Merlin down onto the bed. They undressed one another just enough, dicks poking out of trousers and shirts shoved up over bellies.

It was familiar, comfortable. Nothing at all like the deep sweet pleasure and wonder and focus of having Eggsy under him, Eggsy handing himself over.

The orgasm, when it came, was decent enough; he'd been apart from Eggsy long enough any hand not his own felt good. He brought Merlin off with his mind nice and calm, rather regretting how much he’d revealed in the dramatics of the argument, enjoying the fleeting physicality of the moment.

They flopped back to the bed, not touching. Harry welcomed the chance to collect himself, feeling his heart slow.

“Not bad,” Merlin said. “Feel better?”

“I don't feel worse,” Harry said. He paused for a moment, listening to them both breathe. “I am sorry. For the way things have gone.”

“Good,” Merlin said, without rancour. “I am too, you know. It's weird being on the outs with you.”

Harry shrugged. He was what he was; there didn't seem much scope for improvement now, even as he counted the costs of it.

Merlin said, "Miss him?"

"Obviously," Harry said hopelessly. He couldn't help a rather rusty chuckle. "Christ. I never thought I’d…. well. He’s extraordinary." Eggsy was, he was marvellous: a vivid textured Caravaggio in a world of tiny Lowry stick people.

"He's all right," Merlin said judiciously. "You just love him."

There didn't seem to be much to say to that. Harry slumped back onto the pillows. He badly wanted a cigarette, but he hadn't smoked in twenty years. He imagined it instead, the curl of smoke and bitter-familiar taste, the sense of satisfaction. 

They split the little remaining in the bottle and drank with minimal further discussion, and ate the cold toast.

It was probably the most comfortable they'd been together for six months or more. Certainly not a complete reconciliation, but Harry allowed himself to consider the resumption of their old, natural friendship, until it had become something real in his mind, and welcome. 

Harry had started thinking seriously about a shower and then bed by the time Merlin looked at his watch. “Right,” he said, and rolled off the bed.

He'd finally come to terms with the lack of hair, Harry noticed: last time they'd done this he'd pointlessly smoothed over his bald head as if he still had bed-tousled hair to tame. Harry had laughed, which had gone down extremely not well, and which he privately blamed for the long and boring undercover op he'd been sent on straight after. “Back to work.”

“As you like,” Harry said. Merlin had reached the door, back to Harry, and he said very quietly, “Thank you, Merlin.”

Merlin paused with one hand on the doorknob. He said, "Medical have hired a new headshrinker. She starts tomorrow."

"No,” Harry said, without thinking about it.

"I’m not asking you, Harry."

Harry stared up at the ceiling. Merlin was stiff: despite the words, he expected Harry to kick off; expected Harry to insist on having his own way, as he always did.

He said, “What time's my appointment?"


End file.
